


Don't Fear the Reaper

by Bodhicitta



Category: Blue Oyster Cult, Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M, Triggers, suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-12
Updated: 2016-11-12
Packaged: 2018-08-29 02:24:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8471932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bodhicitta/pseuds/Bodhicitta
Summary: A song fic.  Trigger warning - suicide ideation.  Dark.  Not erotic.The presence of Sherlock in her life is not necessarily a good influence on our Molly.  She has some thinking to do.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I edit after publishing - a lot. It's what I do. Sorry.

_40,000 men and women every day._

She encounters them singly, though, as they come through her lab.

_40,000 men and women every day._

We all end up on the slab.

_We can be like they are._

She was just one more.  

_40,000 men and women every day._

It could happen at any moment.  A cab strikes the curb, mounts the sidewalk.  A stray bullet.  A stroke.  A loose brick falls on you from a construction site.  A bomb.

_40,000 men and women every day._

And wouldn't it be better to have some control over it.  The manner in which it happens.  Not like the people in her morgue.  Taken unawares.  Snatched, felled, as if struck by lightning.

_Every day._

Not special.  Don't imagine you're so special as to think he would miss you.

_We can be like they are._

I don't count.  No.  She did count.  He had refuted that by word and action.  She was needed.  Her services required.  And then things slipped back to the way they were.  Him flirting with her, cruelly, but rebuffing her, so embarrassing.  She was done.  She got it. She understood.  She didn't "do it" for him, whatever that meant.  Maybe he was gay, who knows - but then the thing with that woman, that Mata Hari super spy or whatever she was....

And we could be friends, except he never tells me anything....because....

_...because..._

I'm not central to his life.  I'm an extra.

Molly sniggered.  "An extra in my own life," she said aloud to the empty room.  Toby curled around her ankles, purring loudly.  She almost tripped over him.  It wasn't the half a bottle of vodka...it was the sense of disorientation.  Reality seemed shaky.  Things seemed unclear.  Lines between right and wrong were becoming fluid.  She had broken laws for him, violated her oath of ethics.

Desecrated a corpse.

And he was going to leave...and not even say goodbye.  

She pressed her forehead against the refrigerator door.  "I didn't rate a goodbye.  Not even a goodbye...."

She stood like that for so long, until her head began to throb.  Only one cure for that.  She fumbled her way to the counter, found the vodka, and took another swig.  I'm tired.  So tired.  Tired in my bones.  Tired of being on the sidelines.  An extra in my own life.  I can't believe I ended my engagement...over him...over him.    

And what do I have?  A handful of nothing.  An empty bed.  An empty house...

Toby curled around her leg.  

"Oh, Toby, I didn't mean you," she sobbed.  "My house is not empty, not as long as you are here, my sweetheart."

_40,000 men and women every day._

"We can be like they are," she murmured to herself.

She took a notepad out of her purse, made her way to the couch, and began scrawling a list. 

_What are you doing?_

"Stop it.  You're not really here.  You are in my head.  And I want you out of my head.  No one gets to live rent-free in my head."

_Molly, don't be daft.  I'm right here in the room._

She looked up and there he was, shadowed, sitting in the spindle-backed chair that he preferred.  It had structure, strength.  It did not yield.  Held the body upright.

_What are you writing, Molly Hooper?_

"Care instructions for my cat."

_That's probably a good idea._

"Yes, I think so."

_Never know what could happen.  London is a cesspool of villainous, treacherous murderers._

"My thinking exactly."

_40,000 men and women every day._

"Yes."

_We could be like they are._

"Maybe we already are.  The physicists say it's all a simulation anyway."

_Sorry?  What?_

"Oh, you hadn't read?  Top physicists agree that there is more than a fifty percent likelihood that we are living in a computer simulation in another, 'larger' reality.  Like, a computer game on the screen of some teenaged boy's room, in the quote unquote real universe."

Sherlock's eyes were glazed over.

"Sorry to bore you."

_If it's not about The Work...._

"No...I understand that now - only The Work matters.  We are all just cogs in a machine for you, right?  Puzzle pieces.  Chess pieces...players in the Great Game."

Sherlock stood up peremptorily, walked to the sliding glass door. He slid it open and stepped out.  The breeze made his coat flail out behind him dramatically.

She laughed.  This must be a dream. No one's coat does that in real life.

He turned, and beckoned to her with the slightest indication of his head, and a smirk.

She wobbled to her feet, stumbled to the balcony and joined him.  What a sight she must make.  Hair disheveled.  Crust in her eyes.  Quite the Mata Hari.  So seductive.

_You look beautiful._

"Shut up.  Stop deducing me.  I don't need your approval.  Shut up, shut up, shut up."

Sherlock chuckled, then put both his hands on the balcony railing, lifted a leg like a dog about to pee, firmly planted a foot and hoisted himself up on the railing.  He seemed to waver, as if he were about to fall.  Molly stared at him like a deer caught in the headlights.  He wobbled dramatically, then became perfectly still, perfectly balanced - the exaggerated unsteadiness had been a joke.  He turned with the surety of an Olympic gymnast, caught her gaze, and smirked.

_Come up!  It's fun.  Look!_

He balanced on one foot, and then literally twirled on that foot.  By some miracle he didn't fall off, but instead nimbly pounced back down to the balcony, like an ibex.

"Now I know you are a figment.  I must be really, really drunk."

Molly tried to blink him away.  She rubbed her eyes, rubbed them hard, but he was still there.

Reaching out one knobby hand to her, his hand like a sculpture chiseled out of marble.   _Come on, try it.  I'll hold you._

"No.  This is dumb.  I don't like this game, this...experiment."

 _It's not an experiment.  Look.  I'll just sit on the edge, here like this._ He hoisted himself back up on the railing and sat there.  

 _I'll hold you,_ he said, letting the promise of that much to be desired physical intimacy sink in.   _Don't worry.  You know I've done this before.  I have a lot of experience with great heights._

"I don't."

 _But I do.  Come on,Baby....Baby take my hand,_ he hummed.

"No."

_It's just a question of understanding gravity, wind speed and direction, surface tension, van der Waalsforces..._

"I thought you didn't care about science."

 _I care about what matters._  His eyes bored into hers.

"Don't try to imply you care about me.  Even in a hallucination."

As she clambered onto the railing, he wrapped one strong arm around her.  She was completely secure, completely in his power. She felt something relax.  Something like caring.  Things started to slip away.  Attachment. Concern.  Fear?

Suddenly he swayed forward as if to pull them both off the railing and over the side of the building.  Molly squealed, and he pulled them both back, laughing.

_You have to admit, that was fun, no?  A little bit of danger?_

"Your idea of fun is...perverse."

_But you like that.  Perversion.  Admit that some of the deaths you have seen have been most...intriguing._

His grip around her waist tightened.

"No.  I won't admit that.  I won't admit to something that is not true.  I do not find death intriguing.  I find it horrifying.  If I could reverse it, I ...."

And she trailed off.  She let that thought trail off, too.  She was no Viktor Frankenstein.  She did not long to resurrect the dead, to undo the natural order.  Why were these thoughts swimming in her head?  She well knew her place in the order of things.  She cleaned up after the crime, she reconstructed, she weighed, and tabulated, and conjectured.  And criminals went to jail.  The dead remained locked in their eternal prisons.  She in hers.

She was paralyzed with fear.  Or was it calm.  There's a fine line between being frozen from fear and deeply relaxed from a sense of resignation.  She couldn't move.  Was this really happening.  He was humming in her ear...

_Valentine is done._

Molly gulped.  Something so relaxing and sweet in his voice.   

"Yes. Yes it is.  Valentine is done.  All my valentine's are done.  I never had a valentine.  Not once.  Not even one time.  Not a rose.  Not a box of chocolate.  Not a cheap teddy bear bought in haste from the local drug store....not even from Tom...."

_Romeo and Juliet are forever in eternity._

She snorted.  "See, that's bullshit."  They - all the lovers in all the romance stories and novels - it was all lies.  The only one that made sense to her was Anna Karenina - that was a truthful depiction of male-female relationships.  Ending the way it inevitably would.  Anna's brains and guts spattered across a railway track.  Way to broadcast the ending, Tolstoy.  Foreshadowing.  Sherlock beating a corpse, a corpse she had supplied him.  Laying into it, lashing his whip to draw the blood.  Foreshadowing.  

 _Come on, baby,_ he whispered in his lowest tone, deeply into her ear, boring a hole into her brain.  His breath was hot against her ear, and smelled sweetly of cigarettes and bourbon and an ineffable fragrance of a youngish man with his attempts to keep clean and civilized - deodorant and soaps and shaving cream - barely held at bay the natural inclination to run and sweat and get filthy in the mud and muck of life. A wilderness lingering just on the edges of the sandalwood cologne.  Wolves braying in the night.

She shook off her musings. 

_Don't fear The Reaper._

"Are you The Reaper?" she snorted derisively.  "Please."

But he did seem rather Reaper-like.  Pale skin, wraith-like form.  

_We can be together in eternity._

"Stop it, Sherlock.  This isn't a game."

_40,000 men and women every day._

"I think it's quite a bit more than that."

 _We can be like they are,_ he whispered in his deepest tone.  

"Dead?  Not interested."  At least not yet, she murmured to herself.

_Admit it - you're a little bit interested._

"Of course I am.  It's my job. But I don't glamorize it."

_Yes, you do.  You're fascinated by it.  Like I am._

"No...you're not fascinated by it..."

_Because it's a puzzle.  The greatest one of all.  What's on the other side?_

"No.  It's not a puzzle.  It's a job.  It's a job to you and it's a job to me.  It's not real.  We don't really deal with the implications."  

He opened his mouth to interrupt her, but she forestalled him.  "Because we are not priests!  Or philosophers, or poets!  We don't really care what happens to the human spirit."

_That's where you're wrong.  I care deeply about what happens to the human spirit._

She turned to him.  Freed her arms which had been trapped by one of his hands.  She jabbed him in the chest.  "This is how I know you are not real.  Sherlock does not believe in spirits, or souls."

_Then who is speaking to you?_

"I honestly don't know.  Me?  Myself?  Am I...a schizophrenic?  Have you invaded my brain, my thoughts?  Are you a demon? An angel?  Is it God?  Or am I simply having a seizure?  Or a dream?"

_No dream, no seizure.  No chemical defect.  No destructive explosion of neurochemical impulses.  Your brain is working remarkably well.  A wonderfully well-tuned machine._

He made to pull her off the balcony.

She shuddered, and pulled back.

_I promise you - we'll be able to fly._

"I would like that, Sherlock."

_Yes, you would._

"But no one can fly, Sherlock."

_No one?_

"What is it like...to fly?"

_It is the ultimate aspiration of homo sapien.  To throw off the shackles of gravity._

"But I don't care about that.  What does it _feel_ like?"

_Like heaven._

"I thought heaven would be in your arms."

_You are in my arms._

"Then I suppose I am in heaven."

_You may already be._

His grip around her waist had grown immoveable, like a tree branch grown around her torso.

"Will it hurt, Sherlock?  Did it hurt?"

_Oh, yeah.  It's gonna hurt._

He pulled her in even more tightly to his form.  She closed her eyes and prepared for...for what.  She did not know.  She felt the two of them, the both of them lift, as if one unit.  Her buttocks rose slightly from the railing, and she felt the weight of her entire body tilt forward.  For the first time in her life she felt true fear.  Not the fear from being in a car accident, or from hearing an incredibly loud noise late at night in one's apartment.  She felt the fear of inevitability, of the end.  The end to all things - all dreams, all sunny days, all feelings and sensations.  The children she would never have.  Who would take care of Toby.  And how suddenly all that could be gone.  And all that was in front of her was the blank, unfeeling hard concrete of the street below.  That was the future.  The only future.  She would never again see the stars wheel above her in their celestial grandeur.

She heard a commotion behind in the apartment.  Suddenly a different masculine arm wrapped around her waist, this one somehow more real, colder, harder, and she was pulled, nay, tackled onto the balcony floor.  The back of her head thwacked on the floor, and she lost consciousness.

When she awoke, a shade, a shadow, a spectre was pacing her bedroom.  Her eyes pulled in and out of focus.  Sherlock.  He was taking big strides back and forth in her small bedroom.  He had a piece of paper in his hand, and he was barking into his phone.  

"Yes, it is very unlike her, John.  No, I'm not sure.  But I'm looking at a list of care instructions for the cat. And she was on the...."

She propped herself up on her forearms and her vision swam.

Sherlock turned to her and stopped talking.  He tapped his phone, ending the call.

"What happened?  Why does my head hurt? Why are you in my bedroom?"

Sherlock ignored her words.  Suddenly he loomed up above her, bent down quickly, staring into her eyes, clinically, looking for signs of intoxication, poisoning.  Just as abruptly he stood up, looked around the room, inspecting.  Then he bounded up on a chair.  Inspected the air vent in the ceiling.  Rubbed his gloved hand on it and sniffed his fingertips.  He shook his head and frowned.

Molly swung her legs out of the bed, stood up, and padded out of her bedroom on her bare feet, leaving Sherlock to his investigation.  She supposed he was looking for poison gas, or some sort of mind control signalling device.  He would find none.  But the puzzle would keep him transfixed, for a few minutes at least.

She walked to the sliding glass door, now shut.  She reached out and touched her own reflection.  Was she really going to...

She saw the reflection of Sherlock loom up behind her.

"Come away from the balcony, Molly...."

She hesitated.  Sherlock's reflection reached out to her.

"Take my hand."

She ignored him, leaned her forehead against the glass door, let her body weight be supported that way.  Pressed her hands against the door, against its unyielding coldness and perfection.

"I desecrated someone's body for you," she whispered.  And she shut her eyes.


End file.
